Proper management and exploitation of non-renewable natural resources and reserves and of biological natural resources and reserves that are depletable through unsustainable harvesting or biological reproduction, require proper assessment of the state and/or status of such resources and reserves. For purposes of this specification, the term “depletable” shall be used to refer to natural resources and reserves that are either inherently non-renewable or are depletable through unsustainable harvesting or biological reproduction, and the term “reserve” shall be used to refer to the portion of a resource that is technologically or economically feasible to exploit and shall be deemed to include a so-called “recoverable reserve” or “proved reserve”
Correspondingly, the term “mineral resource” shall be used to refer to mineral bearing material of economic interest in or on the earth's crust, whereas a “mineral reserve” is the portion of such mineral resource that can be mined economically at present, while the cognate term “oil and gas reserves” would define volumes of gas and oil that can be recovered commercially. Unlike the tangible product inventory of a manufacturing company, many natural resources and reserves are physically located underground or underwater or are spread out over vast or inaccessible territories and can therefore not easily be inspected, assessed or quantified, requiring estimates based on the evaluation of technical data that provides evidence of the amount, volume or concentration of such natural resource or reserve present.
In the mining industry specifically, suitable technical data has its origins in a variety of information toolsets available to and used by disparate, professional mining technical disciplines. Such mining technical disciplines are typically classified under so-called Geosciences, Survey, Planning, Rock Engineering, Mine Environmental, Mine Design & Schedule, Mining, Engineering, Metallurgy, Sales & Marketing and Rehabilitation (green environmental) Divisions, with supporting divisions such as Enterprise Strategy, Financial Management, Asset Management, Human Resources, Safety, Health & Environment, Risk Management, Information Technology, Corporate Affairs, Logistics and Material Management. The mining technical data from these disciplines likewise could be reported in technical parameters for material based values such as ore tonnages, slurry densities and mineral grades & recoveries, operational based values such as power consumptions, geological based values such as interpretation of major geological faults & loss factors, and other values such as commodity prices, mine call factors, geological losses, mining overbreaks and labor efficiencies.
Historically, mining technical data remained unamalgamated and untransformed into a globally standardized format that could render the data substantially more available for further multi-disciplinary visualization and analysis. In the mining industry, specifically, information management with such amalgamation and transformation could provide for enhanced decision making based on an understanding of the financial consequences of mining technical activity or observation resulting in changes to the state and/or status of a mineral deposit and thus to that of the corresponding mineral asset in the hands of its right, title or interest holder.
The modern mining industry has widely adopted enterprise resource planning (“ERP”) systems typically for integrating information from a range of internal and external systems across the entire organization, including finance/accounting, supply chain, sales and service, customer relationship management, etc., albeit in models where the use of such ERP systems is largely limited to aspects of the business that exclude the mining technical management of the mineral assets. The ERP systems are primarily limited to financial and transactional management of the business and related resources and the associated supply chain, offering only nominal benefit to the core business of the mining industry in general and, more particularly, its technical disciplines such as Geosciences, Mine Planning, Mining, Mining Engineering and Survey, and their related supporting disciplines respectively.
Unlike ERP systems, mining technical systems based management of mineral assets is typically performed within disparate, expert and usually proprietary mining technical systems, applications and solutions, typically implemented with the assistance of similarly proprietary application software, specifically designed to service the discrete needs of specific mining technical disciplines within mining operations. These systems and software typically provide a single expert discipline perspective of a mineral asset, without integration to and amalgamation of data from other separate mining technical disciplines related to the mineral asset.
The non-integrated nature of the mining technical systems and services domain thus leaves significant areas, including mineral asset valuation, open to discrete interpretation by different technical and commercial disciplines, generally represented by a competent or qualified person within each, often disparate mining organization.
The lack of suitable systems and methods as well as the limited software integration internationally between mining technical systems and ERP systems are demonstrations of the technical complexity and disparate nature of the mining technical systems domain and the fact that there are limited processes where the activities from a mining technical perspective have a clear one-to-one relationship with a financial or commercial transaction.
The fact that modern mining companies only report on mineral resources and reserves once per annum is a further demonstration of the technical complexity and diversity as well as time consuming nature of the data collecting and assessment process, often comprising of manually integrating and interpreting the various technical data bundles from the mining technical disciplines and their supporting divisions that describe the state of mineral assets. Decisions regarding the application of capital to the mineral assets are accordingly impeded by the lack of integration between the financial and mining technical domains, as is the tracking and reporting against capital projects at a granular level.
In this specification, the term “big data” shall be used to refer to a collection of large and/or very complex data or data sets of a magnitude that is not containable in or manageable with relative ease by common, traditional or on-hand data processing platforms, management tools or processing applications.